Glossy Header Photoshop Tutorial

Intro:

Make a glossy/glass looking header with a quake4 background, you can use another background if you prefer, but it has to be a dark screenshot/photo otherwise the glossyness will not work.
The screenshot I used can be downloaded here.
It's the part where you fight the alien which you cannot defeat, eventually you get taken.

Step 1:

Make a new file with dimensions 800 x 250px. Open up the quake3_screenshot.jpg and add it to the new file. If you don't know how to add a picture to a new project or an excisting one, here's how to do it.
Open the quake4 image, select the move tool (V on your keyboard), and drag the image into the file you want the image in.
You can do it a different way to like this, Open the quake4 image, pres ctrl+C, go to the new project, press ctrl V. If the picture is displaced just select the move tool (V on your keyboard) and move until you like what your seeing.

There's one little problem though with the screenshot I'm using, you see there's a crosshair on the alien like in the example below, but we can fix this very easily with the clone stamp tool, which I'll explain in the next step.

NOTE: All preview images are downsized!

Step 2:

Select the clone stamptool
Use these settings:
Brush: 3px normal brush
Mode: Normal
Opacity: 100%
Flow: 100%
Airbrush: unselected
Aligned: selected
Sample all layers: unselected

What this tool does is it takes a part of the image you select and drops it where you want, in this case where the cursor is and maybe a bit around to delete some little white parts you can nearly see but will ruin the end result of the header.
Now the tool is explained we get to the stamp action!

Zoom in on the part of the cursors location (ctr++, with ctrl+- you can zoomout) I used a 500% zoom.
Select an area nearly located to the cursor with HOLDING ALT and clicking the left mouse button. It's best to stamp a part as nearly as possible to the cursor but without any white lining of the cursor.
Now we got the part we want to stamp it's time to stamp, just click with left mouse where you want the copied part to be (just like with the brush tool).

It's VERY important that you keep copying parts around the cursor over and over again or else you just have one color which will look like a blurry part in the end result. Maybe selecting another size of brush will help you out in some parts, but I did it with size 3.

Here's my screenshot without the cursor:

Step 3:

Now we got the hard part finished it's time to pollish up the screenshot and header.

Select the gradiant tool and select the background to foreground gradiant



Press D on your keyboard then X (D is ressetting colors, X is switching the background and foreground color)
Make a new layer (ctrl+shift+alt+N) Name it SHINE. Make a gradiant from top to bottom. (if your working in a design make a selection around the screenshot/header otherwise you have a gradiant all over you design!)

Make a selection like shown in the picture below with the rectangular marquee tool, and press delete which I already did in the picture below.



Set this layer opacity to 50% in the layers window.

Step 4:

Duplicate the SHINE layer and flip it vertically (Edit > Transform > Flip vertical). Move this layer to the bottom so there's 1 pixel between both SHINE layers.
Make a selection like below and delete the selected part (hit delete on your keyboard), set the opacity of this layer to 66%.



Now select the rectangular marquee tool again, and make a selection like mine below, make a new layer again name it TOPSHINE, make another gradiant like you did before using the foreground to background gradiant with a white foreground. Set the opacity of this layer to 42%.



Add some extra stuff like text and extra layers, just expirement around with these shine layers, you can do amazing stuff with it!
Good luck!

My end result: